This paper reviews the orbit determination performance for the last five years of the Cassini Mission Solstice Tour. During this period of time, Cassini had more than 30 satellite encounters, including Titan, Rhea, and Dione. We report on the navigational flyby accuracy, comparing post-flyby reconstructions and encounter predictions, and discuss the performance improvement and challenges over the years. Finally, we give an overview of the "Grand Finale" end of mission planned for 2017.The Cassini mission has been in orbit in the Saturnian system for more than 11 years, and hasreturned a wealth of discoveries and operational knowledge in the outer Solar System. In this paper, we reported on the last three years of navigation operations focusing on orbit determinationand encounter performance. Modeling and strategy changes over the past years now allow us tonavigate bodies at 100s of meters in accuracy, and consider a miss larger than 1 km an outlier.The Cassini Grand Finale will be spectacular - do not miss it!


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    Title :

    Cassini Navigation: The Road to Consistent Subkilometer Accuracy Satellite Encounters


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AAS Annual Guidance and Control Conference ; 2016 ; Breckinridge, CO, United States


    Publication date :

    2016-02-05


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




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